Reflections of a writer on language and life

Monthly Archives: May 2017

A seven month-old baby in Belgium died from malnutrition after his parents put him on an alternative gluten-free diet despite no actual medical diagnosis or recommendation. The child weighed only 9 pounds, about half the size of an average child his age, and was extremely dehydrated. The story brings to light just how dangerous alternative diets can be for very young children.

The baby, identified only as “Lucas” by The Daily Mail, was raised on a gluten-free diet consisting of quinoa milk, rice milk, oat milk, and other alternative milk products. Upon noticing their child’s diminishing health—the boy was described as extremely thin and “gasping for air”—his parents, named only as Peter S and Sandrina V, took him to visit a homeopathic doctor. The homeopath however immediately sent the family to a hospital.

I can’t believe I stuck with this book to the end. It’s a positive insult to the reader’s intelligence. I saw the ending coming way in advance, although, admittedly, not the very last twist. I couldn’t believe the publishers would ever put such crap in a book, so I kept reading in the hope that I had it wrong. It wasn’t just the ridiculous ending that was bad; the writing was, too. The author used the same sentences with only minor variations dozens, perhaps scores, of times. The same thoughts running through the same heads over and over. I wanted to scream “get on with it!” at least fifty times. Enough said. Don’t waste your time on this one.

Child psychologist Alex Delaware is summoned to treat Zelda, a psychotic former actress whose child he once evaluated. She’s on a 5150 hold in a dubious facility and is soon released. Days later she is found dead on a palatial estate in Bel Air, poisoned from ingesting some toxic plant material. With his homicide lieutenant buddy Milo, Delaware goes about tracking down what happened to her and trying to find her missing son. The plot is classic police procedural, my favorite mystery genre, and the author has a knack for description. Put simply, he writes well. I enjoyed the book and recommend it. If you are looking for an idea of a book to read this summer, and you like police procedurals, then you can stop reading here and put this on your list. It’s a good one.

Now, if you’d like my take as an ex-FBI agent, lawyer, and crime novelist as to what wasn’t done quite right, keep reading. For starters, it was realistic, or at least plausible, for Alex to go from person A to person B to person C to gather leads. Pure procedural. But when it got to person Q or R, the serendipity became ludicrous. Everybody he talked to just happened to have one person to suggest who might have information, and all of them were alive, easy to find, and available and willing to talk. He also met every one in person, mostly over a meal. Have they no telephones in L.A.? What that really was was a lot of filler trying to turn a 120-page book into a 350-page book.

Now for the forensic part. The author really slipped here. I think he just got lazy. Take this quote where Alex has just looked up a location on Google Earth:

“In seconds I had full-color, one-year-old, 3-D satellite photos of the property at a variety of angles, the forest-like area … revealed in high definition.”

I use Google Earth constantly for my geocaching and a camera designer for Google involved in Google Earth used to be my next-door neighbor. It does not actually show satellite photos over L.A., although it does over many non-urban or forbidden areas like North Korea. Over L.A. and other U.S. cities they use low-flying airplanes. Okay, I forgive the use of the word satellite. But you can’t look at the area from different angles from that view. The pictures are all taken from directly overhead. Google has given the terrain a sort of 3-D look using clever algorithms and elevation data, but you’re still only going to see the same exact view no matter how you tilt the screen view. Think of it this way: imagine they printed the overhead view on a flat, flexible piece of paper and then pasted that paper over a 3-D model of the surface, complete with hills. That’s what is displayed. Despite the 3-D effect you only see the roofs of the houses. Of course if you use Street View, then you can see various angles at ground level because the Google photo car does have multiple cameras photographing from different angles, but that view wouldn’t show the plants in this scenario.

Next, Alex has a retired cop fly over the property in a helicopter and a plant biologist is able to identify several different species of ground-level shrubs from the infrared photos. This information is used to obtain a search warrant. There are several problems with this. First, IR photography identifies heat, and has very poor resolution. A biologist would not be able to identify various different species from IR signatures no matter how low the helicopter flew. Even if he also used standard photography, he’d have to practically land on the property to be close enough to identify these various species among a very tangled growth area, which would be a 4th Amendment violation and render the search warrant void. I rather doubt it could be done at all without taking a sample back to a lab. A low flight of that nature would also destroy the secrecy of the surveillance, which supposedly went undetected in the story.

There were several other legal hurdles that seem to have been magically vanished in the story, like how does Alex, a civilian, get access to crime scenes and all kinds of evidence only police can get (and even they often can’t), but I’m not going to go into further detail. These quibbles did not destroy the overall enjoyment of the story, although they diminish my rating from 5 stars to 4. This is the first book from any of the prolific Kellerman clan that I’ve read, although the library shelves are full of them. I expect to read more in the future.

I welcome comments on my posts, but they sometimes take a while to appear. Why? I have a spam filter on my site. It does a pretty good job, but it’s not perfect. The majority of comments that get past it are fake, spam posts. For that reason I have set restrictions so that comments do not appear until I approve them. However, WordPress does not “push” notify me that a comment has come. It just adds a little number next to an icon on the dashboard page. I have to remember to look for that as it is not obvious and hides among a lot of clutter on that page. I typically see the dashboard page only when I’m ready to post something new myself. The long and short of it is that it sometimes takes me a few days to notice that a comment has come in and to approve it. I don’t know how that looks on the reader’s end, i.e. whether he or she is notified that the comment has been approved and appears. So if you look for your comment and it is not there, don’t think you’re being snubbed. Just look again in a few days. If you want to reach me immediately, you can use the About the Author/Contact link at the top menu and I will get an email in my inbox.

This data is taken from the IRS based on the number of taxpayers (and their children, since it includes exemptions on the returns) who moved into or out of California between 2015 and 2016. California had slightly more people leave than enter. The top map shows the states from which people come to California, the bottom the states to which they go. In both cases, darker green means more people.

In both cases it is unsurprising that the largest number of migrants both in and out come primarily from the states that are the most populous and the ones geographically closest to California. The maps resemble each other to a large extent, but there are subtle differences. For example, the upper Midwest like Minnesota and Michigan are darker in the upper map, indicating that more of those people want to come to California than the other way around. It looks like more Californians prefer to stay in the Pacific or far west states when they do move. Now compare these maps to the next one:

This map shows a net migration into or out of California as a percent of the population of the other state. I set California at zero for comparison purposes even though it had a net outflow. Every state that is darker than California had a net migration into California with the darkest having the highest percent of their population migrating. Everything that is lighter than California shows a net migration from California to that state with the lightest receiving the biggest bump to their population as a percent. The top maps show raw numbers while this bottom map shows the biggest effect on population percentage-wise. It seems there is still a westward migration going on, especially from the Northeast. It also appears that Californians are moving to adjacent states, probably in many cases motivated by the high housing, taxes, and other costs. There was a net flow of about 14,000 to Nevada, 9,000 to Oregon and a net inflow of almost 6,000 from New York to California. Bear in mind that the IRS data does not show movement of those who don’t pay federal income taxes, like the poor, unless they are taken as dependents on someone’s return. The maps also don’t show movement to or from foreign countries. Even so, it seems reasonable to assume that these trends are consistent with population movement as a whole.

I have two short anecdotes about the sad state of knowledge in America today. My wife went to the store to buy some fish for tonight’s dinner, a fish soup we both enjoy. She ordered a quarter pound of one particular fish. The new clerk at the meat counter scooped a bunch of it and placed it on butcher paper on the scales. It read .41 pounds. She asked if that was the right amount. My wife told her no, she wanted a quarter pound. The clerk, a young woman, asked if that was more or less than what she had on the scale. My wife had to give her instructions to take some off until it reached .25 pounds.

Now I just learned that a large freeway sign has been erected on Interstate 280 in San Jose near the Saratoga Avenue exit. These signs cost over $10,000 each. The sign reads “Saratogo Ave”. I understand that whoever made the sign may not be from this area, but Saratoga is a common place name and has other uses. The Wikipedia page has 31 entries for it on its disambiguation page, including a fish, several battles, and a Chrysler model. CalTrans blames it on a contractor. Perhaps we can’t expect laborers to be able to spell, but I think we can expect them to paint the same letters on the sign as written on the order from CalTrans and we certainly expect those guys to be able to spell the names on roadway signs. Considering the cost of these signs, we also should expect the CalTrans staff and the contractor’s staff (which may be the Department of Corrections) to have close oversight over the spelling and overall accuracy of the signs before they are committed to metal.

I don’t know whether to wallow in dismay at the stupidity of the world or rejoice in the fact I’m not that stupid. Did I just get a better education? Am I just more careful? Have I made any typos in this post? Better check.

Would someone please send a 2017 calendar to all the publishers and producers out there. Somehow they haven’t gotten the word that people don’t smoke anymore, not most sane, admirable people anyway. I’ve noticed a trend in books and movies recently that feature leading characters, i.e. the “heroes” and “heroines” of the stories, who smoke and get drunk all the time. Supposedly these are sympathetic characters. These behaviors, however, do not make them look very admirable.

The days of Mad Men cocktail parties and chain smoking are long gone. I cannot remember the last time I saw anyone smoking in real life. It has been months, maybe years. I can’t think of anyone I know who smokes. It’s interesting that you can tell the demographic a movie or TV show is going for by who smokes. For the mainstream broadcast channels now like ABC, NBC, CBS, if a character smokes in one of their series, he or she is probably a bad guy. They’ve figured out that it is mostly the low-lifes who do (no offense to the non-low lifes who do as I know you exist). In fact, often the person doesn’t smoke until it is revealed that the person is a bad guy. However, in many movies and on the cable channels or “arty” or counterculture channels, the lead characters smoke. Supposedly they are, or look, cool by doing this. I don’t get it. They just look like idiots, definitely not sympathetic. Maybe the demographic they are targeting is the low-life demographic.

Examples of this trend in books: Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough, The Girl Before by JP Delaney, The Muse by Jessie Burton. All three of these are written by British women, but Pleasantville by Attica Locke, and American, can be added to the list. On TV, examples of shows where the “cool” leads smoke are Better Call Saul and Sneaky Pete. All of these drink quite a bit, too, although that varies. I’m afraid series and books like these will inspire some impressionable young people to take up smoking. The only good thing I can say about them is that these lead characters are all pretty much losers in life. If these kids pay close attention (good luck with that) maybe they’ll see that smoking is not the way to a good life.

One star seems a bit harsh since it wasn’t badly written, but in Goodreads, that merely means I didn’t like it, not that it was terrible. I didn’t get all the way through this one. It just got too creepy and graphic with the sex to be enjoyable. I got the feeling the whole plot was devised just to provide some soft-core porn gussied up as drama so that readers could pretend to themselves they were reading it for its literary value, like men who used to tell their wives they read Playboy for the articles.

Odelle is from Trinidad, living in London in the 1960s, trying to make it as a writer as she makes a living as a clerk in a shoe store. She manages to acquire a position as a typist at an art gallery and is taken under the wing of Marjorie Quick, an executive there. The story shifts to prewar Spain where Olive Schloss, a young woman, falls in love with Isaac Robles, an artist and revolutionary. Isaac and his half-sister Teresa are working as servants to the Schloss family. Olive’s father is a renowned Austrian art dealer, her mother a disturbed British woman. Central to the story is a remarkable painting of a young woman carrying her own severed head while a lion looks on. The two stories merge, of course, as the plot reveals itself.

The author writes with erudition bordering on pretentiousness, but succeeds in giving a credible picture of both settings. The story is engaging the whole way. I listened to the audiobook version. The actress who reads the London portions is excellent, with a wonderfully charming Caribbean accent (when portraying Odelle) and upper class English accent (when portraying Quick or other Brits). On the other side, the actress who reads the Spanish portions is terrible. She can’t act and her English so poor she mispronounces words constantly. Orange rhymes with flange. It’s clear she is a native Spanish speaker. This choice may have provided us with an authentic Spanish accent, but at what price? She sounds like she’s reading to three-year-olds, overacting and reading at a pace designed for a slow-witted Braille transcriber. She’s more than a ham; she’s bacon. I don’t understand the choice since there is very little Spanish in the story, just a few words here and there.

For a long time I had a hard time believing the same author wrote the two threads of the story, the Spanish thread seeming so badly written. It just shows how important the reader is. Despite this drawback, I enjoyed the book. I thought the attempt to create a surprise ending by letting us know that Marjorie Quick had a secret failed, as I was able to guess the secret quite quickly (no pun intended), but the ending was still a mostly satisfying one.

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